Ableton Live 9 Suite for guitarist

You can find tons information about Ableton Live 9 but it is hard to find information what there is for guitarist. I have been in beta since last december and used it as guitarist. Ableton Live is only DAW that I have used in real music making. It is not made for guitarist but it has nice features for everyone that makes music.

New gate with new visuals is excellent. With it you don’t have to guess correct values. You can see levels adjust according them. New compressors and EQ8 are worth mentioning too. With Live 9 you can convert audio to midi. You can play your keyboard parts with guitar and convert them to midi. It seems to work correctly. Bending string doesn’t work with it, but in the other hand it doesn’t give you detuned sounds you get from guitar. I gave it only test run so I can’t say it works correctly every time. In that test it seemed to work correctly. You get this from standard version of Live.

So what there is in Suite. Amp is still the same. You can use it drafting stage, but you have hard time trying to get sound you want. At least I can’t get what I want. You get nice sounds out of it but that may not be what you are after. There is no tuner in Ableton Live. That is big minus. I have heard that there is 32 bit Max for Live tuner but not 64 bit one. I am using Guitar rig myself, so those are not big things for me.

In suite you get Max for Live and few pretty useful M4L devices. With Envelope Follower you can control parameters of your effects. For example you can make you playing dynamics control amp gain or reverb wet amount. For me this is worth of upgrade price alone. You also get M4L LFO which is useful too. Buffer Shuffler I haven’t tried yet. Just found out that there is one.

With Suite you get Live instruments. You get amazing things out of them if you put effort and know what you are doing. You also get lot of sampled instruments. Suite is quite good all in one packet for music making. And you can always buy VSTs if you want something specific that certain VST can give.

At the moment I am not sure what I will do with new controller Push. There are nice videos on YouTube but there is nothing how it works when you record audio. Or how it works with time signatures other than 4/4. My songs often have strange time signatures.